In The Flesh
by FunnyFloyd
Summary: Is there anybody out there? - A story for 'Pink Floyd: The Wall' about facing your life, it's pain and the darkest side of yourself.


**Disclaimer:** Whatever my imagination and utter adoration for Pink Floyd's ''The Wall'' may have forced my greasy little fingers to type in, is not mine: Niether the album ''The Wall'', nor the movie ''Pink Floyd: The Wall''. These belong to Pink Floyd and Alan Parker. Although the character Pink is based upon Bob Geldof's portrait, I do not own him either, though I would like to. Very much... He makes a cute little fascist... You haven't actually _read_ all this, have you? Goddamn, what did you expect? That sombody finally would take credit for something? I bet you aren't reading this so I won't feel uncomfortable saying: I actually wrote ''The Wall'', composed the mofo and adapted it, too. Made a great movie, although both Waters and Scarfe were acting like a couple of whiny bitches. But, yeah, so, all of this is mine. Everything the sun reaches, Simbaaaaa!

Whatever...

"_Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken._" -Neil Gaiman-

**Chapter One: The Call**

The first thing he recognizes is pain. He doesn't seem to _feel_ it, can't really feel anything anymore, but he remembers it, and he screams. Or at least tries to, but his mouth is still full of worms and filth and he wants to throw up, throw it all away. What he _can_ feel, however, is the cold tile beneath him, piercing through his fragile skin; he feels completely deprived of everything, he is small, so very small and hardly even visible anymore. He is faintly aware of where he is, but cannot seem to truely focus: Everything is still so crowded even though he feels terribly alone. Voices (_''Hammer! Hammer! Hammer!''_), screams _(''Time to go! Time to go!''_), Whispers (''_Is there anybody in there?''_), it's all still inside him, bashing, kicking, _hammering_, wanting to get out. _Stop_, he thinks, _It hurts, it hurts so badly_, and he braces himself, because he is sure it will never stop.

_I wanna go home_.

xxx

She is so tired of the phone ringing; she wants to smash it into pieces with her bare hands at the sound, no, the thought of it. Yet, all she ever does is to ignore it, _let it ring_, she thinks, though her hands shake with emotions, _let him wait_. She can't keep coming back anymore. She doesn't want to. Which is why she is on the verge of disconnecting the line when the sound of communication bashes her ears, breaking her little cocoon of comfort that she has been wrapped in for weeks now. But something, someone on her right strokes her shoudler, calls her awake and this time she doesn't reject it, but lets a smile form on her lips.

''Mmm, what is it sweetie?''

It's only when she realizes that his voice is not the one she wants to hear that she is awake:

''Your phone is ringing again. Don't you think it's time to answer it?''

She opens up her sleepy bedroom eyes and stares at the face before her: Older, more mature, in some ways more handsome, but the eyes are too brown, they don't have a little green rim around the irises, the features are not as strong as she wants them to be. Not as stubborn. She rolls over with a sigh and for the frst time in almost two weeks, she picks up the phone. ''Hello?''

xxx

''I don't know, I just found him like this...''

Pink has his eyes wide opened; he'd rather shut them up and sleep, but finds out he can't, simply can't. It's like he's not allowed to close his eyes ever again, and he shudders. _If you wanna find out what's behind these cold eyes, you just have to claw your way..._

''Has he said something? Anything?''

''Not as far as I'm concerned.''

He doesn't know where he is, although his eyes are on the verge of popping out of their sockets: It has been some times since he has really _seen_ anything or said anything. For a while now, he has just felt cold. Tight. Dry. Like a worm, living up to his name.

''What do you fucking mean, _as far as I'm concerned_? You found him, right?''

''Well, yeah.''

''Then you ought'a know if he's fucking _said something_!''

''He hasn't,'' the first voice reassures, shakily, ''He has been this way since I found him. Completely still. Maybe it's some kind of a comatose. I dunno, it scares the crap outta me, that's for sure. The doctors gave him some sedatives, put I think they'll have to dose it up.''

_No_, Pink yells, but it only comes out as a shaky whimper, _no more drugs, no more needles.._

_''They'll be no more AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!''_

_... I don't want to be sick anymore._

There's smoke inside his head, that's all he can see, the grey and white dust of bricks smashed to debris. It's like he doesn't remember that much. All he knows is that something has broken, fallen apart inside of him, and that it HURTS, for the first time, because for a long while, he's just been comfortably numb.

Another voice appears. It's more authoritative than the other two, and far more scary as Pink's first thought is that this is just another nightmare: That he is still trapped. Still waiting for the worms to come. But this voice isn't telling him terrible things, it's not mocking him

_Don't be surprised when a crack in the ice appears under your feet._

If anything, it sounds calming, soothing. And Pink doesn't know why but he welcomes the idea of being soothed.

''To be honest, I don't know for sure what is wrong with him, but, being told what has happened, I would say he's in a state of complete shock and still psychotic...'' In his mind, Pink closes his tired eyes and thinks of the wounded rat he once found outside his house. It had been so heavy, and he'd gotten a fever from carrying it around, but to this day he was never sure about the connection between the rat being sick and him being sick. He would have liked the rat to be alive.

''...We have called his wife. She's on her way.''

xxx

''Hello?'' Julia mumbles, blinking her sleepdeprived eyes rapidly to wake herself up.

''Yes, hello, is this the Floyd-residence?''

She doesn't seem to know what is happening on the line between Los Angeles and London. She doesn't recognize the serious, monotonous voice that has only brought misery into her life so far.

''Yes?''

''Are you Julia Floyd?''

Still half asleep she rubs her face and murmurs, ''yes, who is this?''

''I'm calling from the state hospital of Los Angeles.''

Julia is suddenly hit in the face with a frozen sledgehammer of anxiety; ''What?''

''Your husband is in a very severe psychosis-'' She starts awake, flying up from the bed into a frigid, sitting position,

''WHAT!''

xxx

She is running down halls. Endless, they seem. And cold, she's freezing, her whole body shaking, but the cold is only a bad excuse for the fear she is trying to keep firmly at bay. She's good at that- keeping things on an even keel, keeping her head. Pink could never do that, she thinks with a mix of bitterness, anger and sadness: He had never had control over his feelings, stupid git. Her brown, worn-out coat flutters behind her like a shadow and her heels echoes uncomfortably in the never-ending passages. The sterile maze of direction-signs and celing lights flashes before her eyes. They keep her from screaming out in frustration, because she realizes they are helping her finding her way to where she is going. _This must be it_, she reassures herself and steps into the department that says ''Intensive Care Unit'' with great green letters.

''I'm Mrs. Floyd.''

The lady behind the unnessecary large desk raises her head and eyes the weary red-headded woman before her with a look that isn't far from indifferent; ''Yes?''

She clears her throat, forcing her voice not to tremble as she speaks: ''I'm here to see Mr. Floyd.''

''Pink Floyd?''

She opens her mouth: _Are there any other Floyds at the ICU, dumbass?_, ''Yes, Pink Floyd.''

A sad, patronizing mine creeps up the lady's face and she slowly cocks her head: ''It was a very disasterous thing that happened at that concert, I'll tell ya,'' she says while doing nothing to hide that she finds it far more intriguing than awful, ''_Very_ dramatic! The guard found him in a bathroom stall, all gone fishing, if you know what I mean...,'' and then adding, because she's seen the look on the woman's face and not wanting a socker-punch between the eyes, ''Poor thing.''

She then stops talking and gives Mrs. Floyd the directions to her husband's room.

Julia had walked through a great deal of doors in her life; at school, when she was late for class, which had not happened often, and when she had closed the door to the backseat of her car and lost her virginity to a nice guy whom she had given a ride home from the mall a rainy Wednesday a long time ago. She doesn't remember the name of the boy, only the sound of the door slamming shut. She also remembers the last glimpse of what was left of her drugged out wreck of a husband before she closed the door behind her and left him: His head bent down, fingers gliding over the piano keys, hitting random, lazy notes, his eyes far away and his mouth half agape, looking like an utter idiot. That's all she could see before tears blocked her sight. To her surprise, it hadn't been very difficult to close that door, to reject and push away her life with Pink: He hadn't really cared, anyway. There seemed to be a large space between him and the rest of the world that nobody could ever get through. Sure, he could converse with someone, laugh and be polite, but they would always be denied entrance inside his fortress. She could never get through to him, either, so leaving him hadn't been a hesitant descision.

But this time, going back to him and opening that door again, exposing everything she has fought to keep secret from him- her anger, disappointment, shame, guilt, her fear- is the most painful thing she will ever do, far more hurtful than leaving it behind. These few steps through the door to his hospital room is the hardest thing she has ever done in her life.

Xxx

_The walls are white. Apart from a faint rey of light from a blinking bulb from somewhere above, the reflections from the cold sterile bricks serve as the only illumination in the miniature room. _

_Pink straightens up, adjusts himself with his back to the wall; he is trying to focus on the tortuous and nearly illegible words written in the little back book that his bony hands are clinging to in desperation. His mind is drowning in blood and filth and worms._

_He feels funny. But 'funny' isn't the word to describe it. It would be like saying that Holocaust went slightly too far._

_If anything, he feels alien. Like he isn't himself anymore, as if somebody has dressed in his uniform and left him at the hotel-room in front of the television, alone, numb, cold, a shapeless pulp of meat and bones. Pink looks around; up until now it has escaped his attention(like so many other things) that he is inside a toilet stall, positioned beside the bowl and with a half-empty bottle at his feet. He feels dirty- contaminated. He tightenes his grib around the book a little bit harder and mumbles the word from the tainted pages. Yet again, reality slips farther away, locked away behind his wall. _

_''...Do you remember me, how we used to be, do you think we should be closer...''_

_They are waiting for him. They want him, want to devour him until he's gone, like mites devour a carcass. It's disgusting. He closes his eyes and continues to mumble away. Everything is so big around him, everything is amplified and increased, distorted; his whole world is spinning around and the stall turns upside-down, and Pink is being pushed down a black hole of decay. He feels like puking._

_''Stop.''_

**A/N:** More to come, just have to finish the second chapter ;)


End file.
